How to Extract Data from Websites Using Python Strings

A Practical Guide to Web Scraping with Python’s String Manipulation Techniques

Photo by Lars Kienle on Unsplash

Web scraping is a powerful technique for extracting data from websites, and Python offers a plethora of libraries to facilitate this task. However, in some cases, you may not need complex libraries like BeautifulSoup or Scrapy, especially for simple scraping tasks.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can leverage Python’s string manipulation techniques to extract data directly from web pages, without relying on additional libraries.

Understanding the Basics of Web Scraping

Web scraping involves retrieving data from websites by parsing the HTML content of web pages. While libraries like BeautifulSoup and Scrapy provide convenient methods for parsing HTML, you can also extract data using string manipulation techniques if the webpage structure is simple.

Extracting Data with String Manipulation

Let’s say we want to extract the title of a webpage. We can achieve this by searching for the <title> tag in the HTML content and extracting the text between the opening and closing tags:

import requests

# Send a GET request to…